On the heels of migrating the entire student mail service to Google Apps for Education, including Gmail, University College Dublin (UCD) has completed the transition of staff mail to the Google platform, involving supporting 6,000 staff and more than 65m emails.
It is envisaged that the ads-free, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform will save UCD money that would otherwise be spent on provisioning and maintenance of the email infrastructure.
Google Apps for Education includes Gmail for email access, Google Calendar for scheduling and Google Drive for storage, file-sharing, and creating and editing collaborative documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
“The move provides more than a six-fold increase in each customers’ quota to 30GB, along with close integration with Google Calendar and Google Drive,” the head of Web Services at UCD Brian Morrissey explained.
“It also offers improved smartphone synchronisation and puts our service on a more solid foundation in terms of service availability.”
Morrissey said emphasis was placed on the security and data governance aspects of the transition with a due diligence review and legal advice sought prior to the transition.
“With over 30,000 smartphone and tablet devices on the UCD network, ease of access via mobiles to Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive is an important factor in this transition,” Morrissey said.
“Additionally, Google’s continuous innovation process brings service improvements without impacting service availability. The rollout of the service took five months from January of this year with dedicated support offered to university staff throughout,” he added.
